Hiring law? What hiring law?

How Blagojevich aides bypassed state rules for favored job applicants

September 17, 2006|By Ray Long, John Chase and David Kidwell, Tribune staff reporters and Tribune staff reporters Jeff Coen and Rick Pearson contributed to this report.

Records show Owens was paid $45,000 per year as an intern but now makes $55,400 for doing the same job. She said she thought the administration might have been trying to save money by using lower-paid internships.

She said she didn't believe it was to skirt a law giving preference to veterans in hiring.

"I probably set the record as the oldest intern in Springfield."

A day after her interview, Owens asked that her comments not be printed because she was worried about her standing at work.

The governor's executive inspector general has identified the internship program as a way the administration squeezed favored candidates into jobs without competition from other applicants.

Among other examples of interns found by the Tribune: A 63-year-old relative of a congressman, a 59-year-old Springfield Democratic official, and a 56-year-old woman who got to spend the night in the Lincoln bedroom at the Clinton White House.

The Tribune also found examples of politically connected people being hired into jobs in rural counties more than 100 miles from their homes, then allowed to work closer to home. The inspector general found that such maneuvers were used to help favored applicants get jobs ahead of veterans living in more populous counties.

One example is the August 2003 hiring of Beverly Ascaridis, the wife of Blagojevich's former campaign treasurer.

Ascaridis' application was among those given special treatment at the state's hiring agency and she was given a break when she initially failed to meet job qualifications, the governor's own executive inspector general found. Seven months after Blagojevich was elected, she was hired by the state Department of Natural Resources as a manager in an office near the Iowa border.

Ascaridis, a Chicago resident, acknowledged in an interview that she never reported to the Whiteside County office and instead worked in suburban DuPage County.

Ascaridis told the Tribune earlier this month that she reached out to the FBI with her suspicions that her job may have come in exchange for a $1,500 check her husband wrote to Blagojevich's daughter, who was 7 at the time.

Sources familiar with the federal hiring investigation confirm Blagojevich's personal finances are now under scrutiny. The governor has said he did not help Ascaridis get her job and the check was a birthday gift from her husband, his lifelong friend.

Others with political connections who were hired in one county and allowed to work closer to home were the head of an Arab Democratic club who gave more than $10,000 to the governor's campaign, a campaign contributor to a Democratic state senator and a Riverdale alderman who was an early Blagojevich supporter.

While the county transfers and internships provided a path to a job that was supposed to be protected from political influence, another way to hire favored applicants was to create more positions the governor's office could fill as it saw fit.

Blagojevich's spokeswoman, Ottenhoff, said the increase in those jobs was aimed at reducing the number of protected positions that Republican governors had for years used to stash their political friends.

A former hiring official under Blagojevich's GOP predecessor George Ryan said the hiring tactics used by the Democratic administration are nothing new.

"To the victors go the spoils. That's just political reality," said Antoinette Crossgrove, a Ryan loyalist ousted within months after Blagojevich took office.

Crossgrove said it wasn't the tactics but the speed at which the Democrats moved to muscle so many people into jobs that caused complaints.

"They were just so blatant about it," she said of the Blagojevich administration. "If there were candidates with political juice, there were always ways to get them on. County transfers, internships--we used them, sure, but we used discretion."

Blagojevich said he was moving to correct the excesses of his Republican predecessor when he ordered a hiring freeze the day after he took office in January 2003. The move allowed him to hold down the size of state government, but also concentrated hiring authority in the hands of a select group of top aides that included Chief of Staff Lon Monk and Cini.

By September 2004, the office of executive inspector general issued two confidential reports identifying improper hiring maneuvers, including county transfers and abuse of the intern program.

One report detailed how two connected Democrats sought jobs in the waning days of the Ryan administration and ultimately got the jobs they wanted under Blagojevich. Both moves were approved by Monk and Cini.

In the other, more scathing, report the inspector general said, "The governor's office improperly exercised a great deal, if not all, control over hiring" in another state agency and showed "complete and utter contempt for the law."

That report recommended that Cini and his deputies receive training on state hiring law.